Dr. Laurel Riek is a Professor in Computer Science and
Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, with a joint
appointment in the Department of Emergency Medicine, and is affiliated
with the Contextual Robotics Institute and Design Lab. Dr. Riek directs
the Healthcare Robotics Lab, and leads research in human-robot
interaction (HRI), assistive and acessible technology, embodied AI, and
health informatics. Riek’s current research projects have applications in
acute care, neuro-rehabilitation, and home health. The lab is very
interested in supporting health equity through community health efforts.
Dr. Riek received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of
Cambridge, and B.S. in Logic and Computation from Carnegie Mellon. Riek
served as a Senior Artificial Intelligence Engineer and Roboticist at
The MITRE Corporation from 2000-2008, working on learning and vision
systems for robots, and held the Clare Boothe Luce chair in Computer
Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame from 2011-2016.
Dr. Riek has received the NSF CAREER Award, AFOSR Young Investigator
Award, Qualcomm Research Award, and multiple best paper awards. Riek’s
research has been supported by the NSF, AFOSR, ONR, DOE, and a number of
companies and foundations.
Prof. Riek currently serves as HRI Editor for the IEEE Conference on
Robotics and Automation (ICRA), on the editorial board of ACM Transactions
on Human Robot Interaction (THRI), and previously served as the HRI 2023
General Co-Chair and HRI 2020 Program Co-Chair.
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